The City Sounds...

The city sounds different these days. I live on a relatively quiet block of a narrow street connecting busy Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. As I write this morning, I hear rain falling, birds chirping, a car engine belching. Sometimes I hear the beep beep beep of a truck backing up, the slamming of the back of a delivery truck, dogs barking, snippets of conversation, helicopters. Some are natural others machine sounds, the mix tape of the random noises of urban life. But it's definitely quieter than Before. Silence in the city can be a precious commodity—and it is a commodity commanding a high price—but a silent city is also unnerving. Like Rachel Carson’s warning about a pesticide-induced “silent spring,” silent streets and sidewalks are an ominous sign. 

Over the last year a string of restaurants on Connecticut Avenue just north of Dupont Circle had begun to host regular live music. The old Childe Harold—I know it has another name, but it will always be Childe Harold to me—had gotten back to its live music roots; several newer places had begun to feature a single guitar player or small combo, often set up in the front window. Music leaked out onto the sidewalk, mixing with the noise of cars and horns and conversations. This was my evening soundtrack as I walked home from Metro in the Before Times. Now, just silence.

Music and noise. What’s the difference? It’s an insult to call music “noise” as in “hey you kids, turn that awful noise down.” Duke Ellington said that there are only two kinds of music, “good music and the other kind.” We may think that the difference between music and noise is purely subjective—the “other kind” is stuff I don’t like—but noise is also culturally constructed. “’Noise’ was a product of acoustics and psychology” says Shannon Mattern in “Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart,” in Places. In yet another of her wonderful pieces, Mattern is writing about sound, technologies of listening, and about efforts in the 1920s and 30s to analyze and quantify urban sounds. She talks about “scoring the city”--how to listen to the city, the role of the human ear, and what tools we need to perform acts of auscultation—mediated listening. Mattern compares this to how physicians learned to listen to the body—what distress is communicated in the heartbeat, what strength revealed in the deep breath? How should a heart sound, or a joint? What does a healthy body sounds like?

Zach Moshier,Urban Rhythms of Washington DC, Masters thesis, 2016

What does a healthy street sound like? And what is its antiphonal call and response—what is it saying, and what do we hear? The medical analogy does apply but since I’m not a doctor (nor do I play one on TV) I prefer to think of another type of listening—not to the noise of a body, but to music. When Mattern used the phrase “scoring the city,” I thought of the thesis of a former student, who was also a drummer in the WAAC Band. Zach really did score the city: he looked at historical maps to see—and hear—how the beat of V Street had changed over the years. It was a revelation: sound, not only sight, can be an instrument of urban analysis and design.

“Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city,” Petula Clark sang in her urban love song, Downtown. I’ve been writing my own ode to the city during this Covid-hibernation. Called “The City is Waiting” it's a melancholy reflection on the situation that seemed more suited to music than  prose. The refrain is about how the city is listening, waiting, restless, for us to return. When I looked up the lyrics to Downtown to make sure I got Petula’s words right I was struck by the last line of the chorus:  “No finer place, for sure. Downtown. Everything’s waiting for you.”